Substance Abuse & Mental Health Services Administration

CMHS Consumer Affairs E-News
May 4, 2007, Vol. 07-74

CMS Issues New Announcement for State Medicaid Transformation Grants

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) recently announced a second solicitation for grant funds for the adoption of innovative methods to improve the effectiveness and efficiency in providing medical assistance under Medicaid. Over $51 million is available to States and Territories.

Funded via the Deficits Reduction Act of 2005, the permissible use of funds include but are not limited to:

• Methods for reducing patient error rates through the implementation and use of electronic health records, electronic clinical decision support tools, or e-prescribing programs;

• Methods for improving rates of collection from estates of amounts owed under Medicaid;

• Methods for reducing waste, fraud, and abuse under Medicaid, such as reducing improper payment rates as measured by annual error rate measurement (PERM) projects;

• Implementation of a medication risk management program as part of a drug use review program under section 1927(g) of the Act;

• Methods in reducing, in clinically appropriate ways, Medicaid expenditures for covered outpatient drugs, particularly in the categories of greatest drug utilization, by increasing the utilization of generic drugs through the use of education programs and other incentives to promote greater use of generic drugs; and

• Methods for improving access to primary and specialty physician care for the uninsured using integrated university-based hospital and clinic systems. In addition, States are encouraged to apply for grant funds to develop value driven health care initiatives including systems that provide transparency in health care that allow consumers to compare the quality and price of services so they can make informed choices among doctors and hospitals that may include:

• Methods to increase health care transparency which provide consumers with the information and the incentives to choose health care providers based on value. Examples from current State pilots from Medicare's "Better Quality Information to Improve Care for Medicare Beneficiaries" that could be replicated in the Medicaid program include:

  • Initiatives to collect and report performance data, promote comparable quality measures, and create efficient data collection;

  • Collaborations aimed at improving the quality of health care and creating a common, secure, electronic infrastructure to expand information sharing;

  • Creation of a broad-based health care coalition to promote valid, comparable measures to drive quality improvement;

  • Initiatives to collaborate to improve community health, build an IT infrastructure, ensure access to data, report value data, and promote beneficiary involvement.

  • Developing verifiable measures for public reporting.

To find out more information about these grants, please see: http://www.cms.hhs.gov/smdl/downloads/SMD042707.pdf.

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The Center for Mental Health Services is a component of the Substance Abuse and Mental Health Services Administration, United States Department of Health and Human Services.